The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  “The whole thing has caused me the most serious annoyance & vexation,” wrote Bertie.41 He canceled his spring trip to the South of France. The veins in his leg flared up; the doctors diagnosed “gouty muscular rheumatism” and once again forbade exercise.42 He put on weight. When equerry Arthur Somerset saw the forty-nine-year-old prince coming out of the Marlborough Club, he noticed that one side of his beard had gone gray.43

  The management of the case for the defense was entrusted to George Lewis. Wearing a monocle and a fur coat even on hot days, Lewis was the inevitable society lawyer, a man of Mephistophelean cunning who knew all London’s secrets and excelled at keeping disputes out of the courts. “Whatever is going on, not merely before but behind the footlights, is an open scroll to this astute, terrible, and within certain limits, very nearly omnipotent gentleman.”44 He had advised Bertie over the Mordaunt case in 1870, but it was his “lickerish servility” over the Beresford scandal, when he betrayed his clients, defied professional protocol, and showed Daisy Brooke’s infamous letter to Bertie, that earned him an invitation to Sandringham.45 Partly perhaps because he was Jewish and self-made, Lewis was resented by some members of Bertie’s court, and his handling of the Tranby Croft case was much criticized. Carrington thought he was out of his depth. “His sphere lay in the police courts and he was known in the legal profession for being dishonest and a blackmailer.” Lewis was so ambitious, claimed Carrington, that he refused to settle out of court with Gordon-Cumming: “He cannot resist the splendid advertisement of this miserable baccarat business.”46

  The trial began at eleven a.m. on 1 June 1891. By ten thirty, the court was packed. The event was more like a society wedding than a trial. Women in smart summer dresses and fashionable bonnets peered through their opera glasses as Bertie entered the courtroom and positioned himself in a red morocco chair placed at the front of the court, on the left of the judge’s seat. Sitting where he was, and being who he was, he could hardly fail to influence proceedings.

  Wearing a black frock coat, arms folded and smiling broadly, the prince listened to the opening speech on behalf of the plaintiff, Gordon-Cumming, by Sir Edward Clarke, solicitor general in the Salisbury government. After a mild and cautious beginning, Clarke, who was feeling his way, examined Gordon-Cumming. His lengthy questions were intended to show that Gordon-Cumming was innocent: He was a man of honor who had been sacrificed to save the courtiers. That evening, Ponsonby found Bertie “rather tired” from six hours in court, but relieved, “saying the case was going strongly against Cumming.” Clarke, Bertie told Ponsonby, “did not speak with any assurance as if he believed in his client’s innocence,” and Cumming’s evidence was “extraordinarily weak.”47

  Tuesday, 2 June, was the day appointed for Bertie to give evidence. He betrayed no obvious nerves beforehand, though one of the journalists timed him stroking his beard for seven minutes, and another thought he looked “anxious and worn.”48 Francis Knollys sat directly behind him. In the witness box, Bertie was dignified and noncommittal. Clarke dealt courteously with him, and his answers were brief and given in a hoarse voice with great rapidity. When the lawyers had finished, a man from the jury stood up and asked the two questions the lawyers had not dared to ask but everyone thirsted to know. As banker, had the prince seen any cheating on the part of Gordon-Cumming? No, replied Bertie, and explained that it was not usual for the banker to look for cheating among friends. To the second question, whether at the time he believed the charges against Gordon-Cumming, he replied that he had had no choice but to believe them.49

  Sir Charles Russell, the barrister appointed by Lewis, needed to show that Gordon-Cumming was guilty of cheating and that he had thereby wickedly abused the Wilsons’ hospitality. This was not easy, as the Wilsons’ evidence was neither consistent nor convincing. Lycett Green was “deplorable in every way; voice, manner and matter.”50 Under cross-examination he broke down and could remember barely anything, admitting that he had never heard of the system of masse en avant that Gordon-Cumming had used—a critical point in Gordon-Cumming’s favor. Knollys thought that Lycett Green “completely lost his head” out of nerves.51 Refusing to remember may, however, have been a deliberate ploy on the advice of George Lewis, who considered that Lycett Green’s role at Tranby Croft had been “so unsympathetic that the less he remembered the better.”52 His incoherence was redeemed by his wife, Ethel, an assured witness who looked pretty in black, and on 4 June, Knollys reported to Ponsonby that Lewis had told him that “the general opinion in Court was that Cumming had not a chance.”53

  The sensation came with Sir Edward Clarke’s speech on Monday, 8 June. With the Prince of Wales sitting in court before him, Clarke demolished the Wilsons’ case against Gordon-Cumming. “Nobody except Stanley Wilson saw any foul play except a person who was expecting to see it.”54 If Gordon-Cumming had intended to cheat he would never have placed his counters on white paper. As Bertie shifted uneasily in his seat, Clarke declared that Lord Coventry and Owen Williams had acted as false friends toward Gordon-Cumming, whom they had thrown over in order to shield the prince. “There is a strong and subtle influence of royalty,” urged Clarke, “a personal influence—which has adorned our history with chivalrous deeds; and has perplexed the historian with unknightly and dishonouring deeds done by men of character, and done by them … to save the interests of a dynasty or to conceal the foibles of a prince. This is what was in the minds of Lord Coventry and General Owen Williams.”55

  “HRH is very greatly annoyed,” wrote Knollys that evening. Clarke’s swipes were gratuitous: “without any apparent object [he] brought in the Prince’s name as often and as offensively as possible.”56 Bertie resented Clarke’s “spiteful” attack: Clarke, however, was reported to be “quite unconscious” of having been severe or causing offense.57

  Bertie was not in court on 9 June to hear the four-hour summing-up by Lord Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice, virtually ordering the jury to decide against Gordon-Cumming. The jury retired for only thirteen minutes before returning with a unanimous verdict for the defendants. In court this was greeted with booing and hissing, and the Wilson family were mobbed as they left. Bertie, who was at Ascot, was hooted by the crowd. On the last day, his horse, The Imp, won a race and he received a tremendous ovation, which, he wrote, was “most gratifying especially after the way the Papers have abused and vilified me after the Cumming trial.”58 The toffs remained silent, however, as “dumb as fishes,” prompting Carrington, himself a Liberal, to reflect that “the people and the Liberals are far more loyal supporters of the Crown than ‘Society’ and the Tories—when Royalty is in real difficulty.”59

  Clarke’s speech left a bitter taste. Queen Victoria thought it a “fearful humiliation” to see the future king dragged “through the dirt just like anyone else, in a Court of Justice.”60

  But that was the point, really. The monarchy was not above the law. Public opinion considered the verdict unfair, and Gordon-Cumming became a hero. The day after the verdict he was dismissed from the army and married a twenty-two-year-old American heiress, Florence Garner, usually known as Flip. He was received on his return to his native Forres with an address from the provost and “great rejoicings.”

  “Such is Scotch morality and piety!” commented Bertie.61

  Bertie, meanwhile, plumbed new depths of unpopularity. Bishops deplored his gambling from the pulpit, the postbag at Marlborough House bulged with angry resolutions from Nonconformist churches denouncing his wickedness, and the press poured a torrent of moralizing upon his head.62 As The New York Herald’s L. J. Jennings wrote to Knollys, “anybody would think that he had broken all the ten commandments at once, and murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury.”63 The republican Reynolds’s Newspaper gloated that royalty was revealed as rotten to the core: Bertie had brought the monarchy to the verge of destruction.64 Queen Victoria worried about the damage, but, as Vicky pointed out, much though she abhorred gambling, the press campaign was hypocritical and exaggerated.65 In
the Pall Mall Gazette, George Lewis tried to stop the stampede by deploring the double standards that led the press to vilify the nonpolitical Prince of Wales for committing a minor sin while turning a blind eye to adultery by politicians.66 Though gambling was abhorred by Nonconformists and sections of the middle and upper classes, its growing popularity among the working classes meant that Tranby Croft probably did little serious damage to Bertie’s standing.67

  The lesson of Tranby Croft, however, was, as The Times pointed out, that the prince was not entitled to a private life. No matter how hard he worked at his public duties, the people still had a right to know what he did in private and a right to deplore his gambling, because he was “the visible embodiment of the Monarchical principle.”68 The court case, which was reported at length in the newspapers, offered a vivid, intimate snapshot of Bertie’s social life, zooming in on such details as the gambling counters he brought with him in his luggage, and marked a landmark in the development of a democratic monarchy open to public scrutiny.

  Bertie resented his inability to answer his critics, and refused to bow to the pressure.69 The Nonconformist churchmen went unanswered. Victoria urged him to write an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, but he resisted, declining to write anything hypocritical.70 In this affair at least, Bertie knew that he had acted “perfectly straightforwardly and honourably.”71 Honor was the key to the whole thing, and for Bertie and his court it counted for far more than middle-class morality. Gordon-Cumming was a “d——d blackguard.”72 He “has no sense of wrong or right.”73 By going to the law, he had broken the code of honor and “done his utmost to mix my name up in the matter in endeavouring to cloak his iniquities.”74 Alix, who was always seen as the ultimate arbiter in matters of chivalry, agreed. Gordon-Cumming, she told Georgie, was a “brute” and a “vile snob” who had “behaved too abominably to them all.”75

  The punishment was social disgrace. Gordon-Cumming and his wife went to live in lonely exile on their barren Scottish estates. The neighbors never called, no invitations ever came. His friends refused to speak to him. But at least he had Flip’s $80,000 a year, and he used her money to renovate his castle at Gordonstoun.

  Bertie had at last concluded that Eddy’s army career was “simply a waste of time.”76 Eddy was worryingly lacking in energy and self-esteem. Carrington watched him visit Wycombe and make a speech: “When he sat down he turned round and said to me, ‘I have made a rare ass of myself.’ It is pathetic to see how little confidence he has in himself.”77 Bertie suggested three alternatives.78 Plan number one was to send Eddy on a long sea voyage to the colonies, out of reach of temptation. Queen Victoria put her foot down. Eddy, she said, had been “dosed” with the Colonies. She urged Bertie’s option two: a European tour.

  He has been … nowhere but to Denmark in Europe. He is only able to speak French badly and German equally so. He has never, like every other Prince … been in contact with any other court but Berlin or seen fine works of Art … [He ought] not merely go to young colonies, with no history, no art and nothing but middle class English speaking people … If the Prince of Wales is afraid of his making a mesalliance which the Queen is not afraid of, Australia, Canada etc. would be worse in its dangers in this respect.79

  Bertie, however, was concerned not with Eddy’s education, or lack of it, but with his dissipated behavior, a subject he dared not mention to his mother, as Knollys explained in a note to Salisbury: “Unfortunately [the Queen’s] views on certain social subjects are so strong that the Prince of Wales does not like to tell her the real reasons for sending Prince Eddy away, which is intended as a punishment and as a means of keeping him out of harm’s way, and I am afraid that neither of these objects will be attained by his simply travelling about Europe.”80

  Bertie’s third option was a surprise: to marry Eddy off to Princess May of Teck. Princess May was the daughter of Queen Victoria’s first cousin Mary, the Duchess of Teck, known to many as Fat Mary. The Duke of Teck was the son of Duke Alexander of Württemberg, who made a morganatic marriage to a Hungarian countess. The blight of “commoner’s” blood meant that, instead of succeeding to the throne of Württemberg, the Duke of Teck was reduced to “vegetating inconspicuously in England, pruning roses.”81 Incapable of living within their means, the Tecks ran up large debts; they were pursued by their creditors, and, after the humiliation of auctioning their possessions in 1883, spent two years in exile in Florence.82

  Princess May’s nonroyal blood ruled out marriage to a German prince, and even the Wales princesses looked down on “poor May! with her Württemberg hands!”83 Yet, her father’s lack of funds disqualified her from marrying an English duke. Her marriage prospects seemed dim: “She was too Royal to marry an ordinary English gentleman, and not Royal enough to marry Royalty.”84 Better educated than the Wales children, Princess May was a studious girl with a phenomenal memory for objects and faces and a passion for lists. Had she not been a princess, she would have made an excellent museum curator.85 In Alix’s eyes, she had the great advantage of not being German. May’s mother, Alix’s friend and cousin the Duchess of Teck, gushing, good-hearted, extravagant, and chronically unpunctual, drove Bertie crazy, while Princess May, who was frightened of him, annoyed him. Only the year before, she had been rejected as a possible wife for Eddy because the “vision of P[rince]ss May haunting Marlborough House makes the Prince of Wales ill.”86

  Meanwhile, Alix, who was not at the time on good terms with Bertie, departed for Fredensborg. Here, outwardly at least, the Glücksburg family party was rumbustious as ever. Oliver Montagu arrived to find himself “in a room with an Emperor, Empress, 3 Kings, 3 Queens and Grand Dukes, Grand Duchesses, princes and princesses to the number of 30 or 40!” Three hundred beds were occupied in the palace, but the royal families saw nothing of their suites, and lived in each other’s rooms, “running in and out like rabbits.” In the hall, Montagu found the czar of all the Russias and persecutor of the Jews, Alexander III, “running around after the children with a huge whip which he was cracking, dogs barking and children howling.” Alix seemed “perfectly happy,” or so thought her parfit knight Montagu; in truth, as news reached her, brought perhaps by Montagu himself, of Bertie’s indiscretions with Daisy Brooke, she felt angry and humiliated.87

  Instead of coming home, Alix decamped to the Crimea, accompanying the czar and Minnie on their silver wedding anniversary trip.88 This sudden change of plan meant that she would not return until after Bertie’s fiftieth birthday party on 9 November 1891—the strongest signal of displeasure she could give.

  In Alix’s absence, arranging Eddy’s marriage fell to Bertie. Eddy could be dragooned and told “he must do it—that it is for the good of the country etc etc,” but Princess May’s acceptance was by no means certain.89 With staggering tactlessness, Bertie commanded Daisy Brooke to invite May and her parents to a house party at Easton, and here the preliminaries were settled.90 The Duchess of Teck was in seventh heaven; after a life spent on the fringes of royalty, always short of money, she was now transported to within spitting distance of “the greatest position there is.”

  It was while he was staying at Easton that news reached Bertie of a fire at Sandringham.91 From the pine-clad slopes of Livadia, Alix cabled laconically to Victoria: “Arrived safely beautiful easy journey … lovely place. In despair at dreadful fire at Sandringham cannot conceive cause.”92

  By dint of keeping the gas blazing for a week, Sandringham dried out in time for Bertie’s birthday, and he held his party almost as if nothing had happened.93 Alix was conspicuous by her absence.

  No sooner was the party over than disaster struck again. Georgie succumbed to a bilious chill, which turned out to be typhoid. Frightened of being stuck at Sandringham with a critically ill son, Bertie rushed him up to Marlborough House. Here, as the doctors posted twice-daily bulletins on the gates charting the alarming course of the fever, Bertie was confined with his son. He seldom left the house; he was the only family member allowed to
visit the sickroom. He attended the doctors’ consultations and wrote telegrams to the Queen and Alix.94 “I deeply regret Alix’s absence … at this moment,” he told Vicky.95

  Alix regretted it even more, and her anger with her husband melted as she hastened home from the Crimea: “terrible [sic] anxious about poor darling Georgie such a shock on top of fire. Travelling night and day to get home,” she wired the Queen.96 By the time she reached London on 22 November, Georgie was over the crisis.

  Taking everyone by surprise—the engagement had been expected in the New Year—Eddy proposed to May while staying with the de Falbes at Luton Hoo.b “Of course I said yes,” wrote May in her diary.97 At last Eddy had done something right, and Bertie was overjoyed. May, he told Vicky (who was not thrilled by the news, as she still had hopes that Eddy would choose one of her own daughters), was “very well brought up with a good head on her shoulders.”98 Not everyone was taken in by Bertie’s newly discovered enthusiasm for the charms of the Teck princess. “Considering he has known her intimately since birth, it has taken him some considerable time to find it out, nearly one quarter of a century!!!” wrote Lady Geraldine Somerset in her diary.99 Alix was in no doubt that Eddy had found the right bride: “Thank God we all know and love darling May so many years that she will be one of us at once and the fact of her being English will make all the difference and carry the whole nation with them—particularly as dear May has always been one of the most popular members of the family.”100